2 - The mathematical challenge to orthodoxy

Summary

In chapter 1, we saw how the Soviet political economy of socialism was born as a form of Marxist–Leninist ideology, how it proved totally barren of relevant policy advice and how – even in the seventies – continued party insistence upon its primarily ideological role condemned it to marginalisation among professional economists. It was discussed in official declarations and forewords to scholarly books, but actually neglected by most economists in their professional work. It still had some importance as the general frame of reference into which all economics, especially that of not a purely technical nature, had to fit somehow. For most economists, because of their education, it was also the natural discourse within which to pursue their theoretical and policy generalisations. Furthermore, as we shall see in chapter 5, the importance of policy issues within political economy grew. None the less, since the fifties, most reform economics was to be found outside political economy. In particular, there was an open challenge to the leading role of political economy in the late sixties. Economic reformism and reformism in economics coincided in the new Soviet mathematical economics of optimal planning.

Contemporary observers were struck by the rapidity with which Soviet economics seemed to change during the late fifties and early sixties. Just before that, all Soviet social science had seemed one Stalinist wasteland of intellectual barrenness, and suddenly, as if from nowhere, groups of economists, administrators and mathematicians had sprung up, advocating administrative rationalisation, economic reform and a re-examination if not abandonment of long-held Marxist doctrines.